Queen of Trial and Sorrow (2 page)

From the village came the sound of cheering, followed by the clump of horses’ hooves and the jingle of harness in the courtyard.  My four year-old son was hanging out the window.  From below, my mother called: “Hurry up, Bess!”  Seizing Richard by the collar, I hauled him fully into the room and in so doing I glanced into the courtyard without any particular interest.  Among all the milling men and horses down below my eye was drawn to him, for he was outrageously tall.  At the same moment, possibly because of Thomas’s shrieks, he looked up and our eyes met and he saw me before I quickly drew back, feeling foolish.  Well, that decided it: I would have to go down.

There was no time for me to improve my appearance.  My serviceable gown was of plain gray.  Barbe and wimple of snowy linen, tokens of my widowhood, framed my heart-shaped face in nun-like severity.  That’s what I looked like – a nun!  Sister Elizabeth.   

By the time I had chivvied my sons along to the nursery they shared with their younger aunts he was in the hall.  I descended the stairs slowly, my gaze lowered.  Conversation died away to silence and I was aware that they were all watching me.

“Lord king,” I murmured and executed a perfect curtsey, one leg steady behind the other as I sank and bent my head slowly, gracefully, like a flower on its stalk, and my skirt settled around me with a whisper.  Rising again with the aid of a courteously extended hand, I straightened and lifted my eyes to look at him.

My father cleared his throat.  “Your Highness, permit me to present my eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Lady Grey, widow of ah… Sir John Grey.”  He hesitated over the name because the king would know my husband had been killed in battle against his powerful ally, the Earl of Warwick. 

A tingle ran up my arm when he brought my hand to his lips.   He couldn’t take his eyes off me and his eyes said he certainly wasn’t angry that I hadn’t met him at the door with the rest of the family.  I had seen that look before and wasn’t surprised.  What did surprise me was my own instantaneous response to him.

I had expected to see an immature boy, made arrogant by his own successes.    Instead I found as near perfect a specimen of young manhood as the good Lord had ever put upon the earth to break the hearts of foolish women.  Standing head and shoulders above everyone else, he looked every inch a king, with the kind of face and figure that provoked an alarming heat in me.  Light brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, straight nose, fair complexion, full-lipped mouth both sensual and self-indulgent, and with a cleft in his chin, the whole was beautiful yet wholly masculine.  And that beautiful head was set upon a tall and well proportioned body: broad shoulders and chest, muscular but without bulk, slender waist and hips, and limbs both supple and strong.  Add to these charms the fact that he was now in possession of a crown, and even though his right to that crown was in dispute, he was without doubt the most eligible bachelor in Europe.

With the first touch of his lips on my hand he brought to life that part of me that a conventional and insipid marriage had failed to awaken, a part that I hadn’t even known existed, as the sun brings to life the flowers of the field.  I had heard he was handsome and charming, and that women threw themselves at him, but I had always thought such women silly and myself above such infatuations.  I had not expected to be
ravished
by one look from those blue, blue eyes… me, a respectable matron and widow.

It was strange: I had met handsome men before, but I had never before felt such a strong attraction.  I have no idea how long we stood there, just gazing at each other.  My hand was still in his.  I don’t think he noticed. I don’t think he would have noticed if the manor had collapsed about his ears. 

……….

“He wants me to raise fifty men and take them north to join the Earl of Warwick in mopping up operations,” my brother Anthony told me that night when he came to my chamber to bid me good night.  He was the eldest of my brothers, the same age as the king, nineteen, and although I was five years older we had always been close because he was mature for his years.

I didn’t like to think of him going to war.  He had fought at Towton because it was expected of him, but claimed to have used his sword only in self-defense.  It was not cowardice, by any means, only a principled repugnance of any sort of violence and particularly what he was pleased to call ‘the wicked waste of war.’ Anthony loved to coin such pithy expressions. ‘It is high time civilized man found a better way to settle his disputes,’ he had once said.   But when challenged, he had been unable to come up with a feasible alternative.  I had advised him that he ought not to share his opinions with the warlike race he dwelt among. 

“Perhaps you won’t see any fighting,” I suggested half-heartedly.

“Margaret won’t give up.  She’s intriguing at the Scottish court.  If she gets help there she’ll be back in England, sure as dusk follows day,” he said gloomily.

Her husband was weak and ineffectual, of a monkish temperament and certainly no soldier, and her only son was a child, so she did the fighting for them.  She would continue to fight for them till the breath left her body.  Captain Margaret, the Yorkists called her.

“Did he fine us?”  I asked.

“No.”

“That was good of him.  You didn’t expect to get off scot-free, did you?  He’s been very lenient.  Others have been fined, or placed under bond.  We should consider ourselves fortunate, as it’s well known the royal treasury is empty.” 

“I don’t consider myself at all fortunate!  I’m the one who has to go north.  To Warwick, of all people!”

The Earl of Warwick was the man who had done more than any other to help the new king win his throne.  He had once taken my mother, father and Anthony captive, and although they had been used honorably Anthony would never forget how he and Father had been publicly berated for being lowborn upstarts.

“We are all going to have to reconcile ourselves to the new rule, at least for the time being.”  I found myself thinking that perhaps it would be a good thing for England if Henry and Margaret never had rule of this land again.  Henry was no more than a puppet in the hands of others and Margaret had turned into a vengeful and cruel woman.  “She threw the crown away,” I said.  “Bringing a Scots army into England… How could she do such a thing?”

She had promised unlimited plunder south of the Trent in mainly Yorkist lands, in lieu of wages.  The Scots had gone much farther than she intended: setting fires, destroying livestock, orchards and fields, raping women and girls, stealing from religious houses and even killing monks who tried to protect church property.  In other words, behaving like a conquering army on foreign soil.  What did she expect – that those wild borderers would knock on a rich man’s door, ask for his goods and if refused go on to the next house?  Margaret of Anjou was no fool.  She was utterly ruthless, didn’t give a tinker’s curse about who suffered as long as she won in the end.  The Scots had their revenge for hundreds of years of border warfare, in which they had come off worst.

“How could she be surprised when the Londoners refused to open the gates to her army?  She left them no choice.  Rather than turn the city over to her Scots’ marauders they, in effect, rejected their king.”  I had never before spoken so disloyally of my sovereigns, and I was surprised that Anthony didn’t rebuke me.

Instead, he said: “And York’s son and Warwick were quick to take advantage.  They were at the gates within days of her departure.”

“And given a rapturous welcome.”

How quickly they had turned things around!  From the most abysmal defeat at Wakefield to a dizzying pinnacle of success – Edward of York crowned, Henry and Margaret driven from the kingdom – in just three short months.

How Margaret had feared York who, according to the English laws of primogenitor, had a better claim to the throne than Henry did, who was standing in the wings eager for his chance at center stage and already had two sons close to manhood and two more following.  She learned to fear Warwick too, as he grew in prestige and power.  But never did she fear Edward, York’s heir, an unknown boy who had spent most of his years sequestered at Ludlow on the Welsh marches.  She hadn’t anticipated him.  She hadn’t even seen him coming.

I smiled at Anthony.  “Now that you’ve met him, don’t you find the change of allegiance less repugnant?”

Having looked into those blue eyes and listened to him talk over dinner of his policies and plans, I certainly felt more optimistic about the new rule and about the future.  After Henry’s feeble ineptitude and Margaret’s ruthlessness, he was like a breath of fresh air.

Anthony raised his brows at me.  “Oh, not you too!”

“What?”

“You’ve been seduced from your allegiance by a fair face.  And don’t give me that prim look.  You’re as bad as our idiot sisters.”

“I certainly am not!” I declared, feeling my color rising.  “Go away.  You may be a lord, with fifty men to command, but you’re still a brat.”

……….

The king came for another visit in September, after touring the western shires, and this time there was no doubt who it was he came to see.  My sisters were greensick with envy when he invited me to show him the gardens.  My hand rested on his, and even that touch was enough to make my body vibrate like a plucked harp string. 

We spoke of many things that day, but I particularly remember him telling me about the deaths of his father and younger brother while he had been raising an army to take to his father’s support and, to his everlasting grief, roistering away the Christmas season with his friends in Shrewsbury.  The Lancastrians, under the command of the Duke of Somerset had broken a Christmas truce and York was lured from his castle of Sandal and slain on the battlefield.  His second son had survived and been taken captive by men who hoped to have a fat ransom from him.  And so it might have happened, but that the vengeful Lord Clifford, whose father had been killed at the first battle of St. Albans, was riding by and, seeing him there, stepped down from his horse, drew his dagger and butchered the bound and helpless seventeen year-old like a hog.  In the end, the king said, all that was left to him was to die with dignity, on his feet, facing his killer, but because he was injured even that was denied him.  Even then there was a thread of sorrow in his voice and he said that he didn’t think he would ever be whole without the brother who had been his constant companion since infancy.

He had his revenge in the end though.  The night before the battle of Towton there was a fight for the bridge at Ferrybridge.  Butcher Clifford was there.  Lord Herbert put an arrow in his eye.

The Yorkist leadership was wiped out that day, not only York and his son but also Warwick’s father and brother.  God forgive us, when we of the queen’s party heard, we gave thanks to God, hoping for peace.  And when we heard how those noble bodies had been desecrated, their heads cut off and set above the gates of York, the duke’s head festooned with a paper crown, we were shocked, for it was not our way, but not too much so.  As for the young earl, I remember my mother saying that he’d been in harness and if he was old enough to fight he was old enough to die.  How different things are from another perspective.

It soon became apparent that Sandal had merely swept away two fathers to make way for two abler sons.

My father said it was Sandal that changed Edward from a careless youth into an effective and capable man who showed from the start qualities of leadership and battlefield skills amazing in one so young.

Barely a month later be fought and won Mortimer’s Cross, the famous battle where three suns appearing in the sky presaged his victory; and then less than two months after that came his greater victory on that snow-laden Palm Sunday at Towton, of which Anthony had said no man who lived through it could remain unchanged.

He told me of his mother, who he clearly adored, and of his two younger brothers, who she had sent to Burgundy for safekeeping in case her eldest son should follow his father and brother to the grave.  He had brought them home in the summer and bestowed dukedoms on them.

A hand was resting on his silk-clad thigh and I covered it with my own, just the gentlest of pressure.  It was forbidden to touch the king without his leave, but I did it.  I felt humbled that he had shared these memories with me. 

The sun was going down beyond the garden wall.  We had talked for hours and I knew he would soon have to leave to return to Stony Stratford.  I wanted to keep him with me as long as possible.  I admit he fascinated me.

“I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone so beautiful,” he said softly.

He was beautiful too.  I lowered my eyes and blushed at my wayward thought.  We were sitting on the stone coping beside the carp pool; it was my favorite spot. He was so close that he pinned the skirts of my gown beneath him; I was quite unable to move until he was ready to let me go. 

“I have thought of you often,” he said, silky-soft, “with longing and desire.” 

He contrived to capture one of my hands; it was pale and perfect, with slender fingers and manicured nails.  He lifted it to his mouth, touching and tasting with lips and tongue before I gently disengaged it.

“I think perhaps it is time we returned to the house, your Highness.”

“A kiss before we must part.”

“No, Sire,” I said as firmly as I dared.